Clegg to meet Vice President Biden for talks on foreign policy after UN speech

NICK CLEGG will today meet his US counterpart Joe Biden after telling the United Nations the UK would increase foreign aid spending to tackle problems including infant mortality and malaria.

The Deputy Prime Minister intends to consult Mr Biden, the US Vice President, on how the coalition Government can improve social mobility in Britain, as well as discussing foreign policy topics such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The White House summit will be the pair's first face-to-face meeting, but Mr Clegg said they had formed a good relationship in a series of video-call discussions in recent months.

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He added: "I'm quite keen to look at some of the work he has done for President (Barack) Obama on Middle America and issues of social mobility, which I'm pushing hard within the Government, to see if there are things we can learn.

"I think the whole debate about how we make a tax system reward work and reward social mobility, deal with disadvantage, these are things which he has grappled with domestically."

Yesterday Mr Clegg stood in for David Cameron at the UN in New York, where he promised UK aid spending would increase to 0.7 per cent of gross national income from 2013.

He added the Government needed to convince British voters the international development budget should be spared the deep cuts that will be imposed on other Whitehall departments.

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"We have a job to explain to people back home that this isn't only the right thing to do for all the obvious moral reasons... but that it is also in our enlightened self-interest," he said.

Maintaining that increasing aid spending was not "naive altruism", Mr Clegg added: "We can't cut ourselves off from the rest of the world.

"If the rest of the world is susceptible to extremism, conflict, the volatile effects of runaway environmental degradation, it affects us.

"It affects us directly. It affects the safety of British families on British streets. It affects the people who come to live in the United Kingdom. It affects our shared environment."

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The US visit is Mr Clegg's first round of high-level international diplomacy since he became Deputy Prime Minister in May.

The Sheffield Hallam MP has met dignitaries including UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon and Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, as well as charities and aid agencies.

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